Thursday, April 2, 2009

How to Condition Your Cricut Mat

Have you ever noticed that when you get a new mat, it's really sticky! I mean, REALLY sticky! In fact, it's best to only use heavy cardstock initially as the mat will not let the thinner paper come up.

To combat this, after opening the mats up, I usually press the mat against a clean T-shirt (or the one I'm wearing, ha ha!) and this removes the excessive stickiness.

But, Cricut Dan has an even more interesting idea and people on the yahoo group say this prevents those little paper stickies from clinging to your mat!

17 comments:

Wow! All this time I thought we shouldn't touch the mat because the oils from our hands would make it less sticky and that would mean the paper wouldn't stick to the mat and thus make our mats last less time! I guess I'm still finding it hard to believe that we should want to oil-up the mat before we use it the first time!But he seems to know of what he speaks. And I am a baby cricuteer.

I've been doing it since I saw this and the reason it helps is that the paper doesn't stick and tear on the mat and little pieces and fibers don't build up as bad. Also amazing is when your mat starts feeling less sticky take a baby wipe to it to get dirt and particles off of it and it is sticky again for a while.

Thanks for the ideas! My friend has one and she didn't know to "season" her first mat and had trouble with her paper wanting to divide in half. I thought I would do the t'shirt thing like you suggested until I saw Dan's video... think I'll try that instead. :)

Oh, I just experienced the tooo sticky new mat syndrome and was sooo frustrated, Thank you for eliminating the taboo of touching the mat! And now I'll try the marker outline and cut shape element. Thank you for sharing tips. MaMaK at drdianek@att.net

I heard this before but not to this length. I just took new mats out, and conditioned them with my hands, but it was really sticky, did the trick with the papers and that really helped!Blessings, Donna

He said re-positionable dotto glue. I did not hear him state any particular brand, but if you Google "dotto repositionable adhesive" you will find a few brands like HERMA and TOMBOW, etc. Sounds like you would just roll the adhesive out onto your mat, making sure to cover the corners and the middle section. I hope this helps.

Thanks!!! This is awesome. My DH just bought me new mats and I used the first one but got frustrated because it was tearing my paper. So I didn't even use the second one yet. I will be pulling that puppy out tonight and testing this. Would like to know more about making my mat sticky again. I felt like my mat didn't stick very good after using a baby wipe on it.

Before i resort to throwing old mats out, i will lightly spray the back of whatever paper i am using with light adhesive. This works great with heavier paper, but an extremely light mist is needed with regular paper.

He said re-positionable dotto glue. I did not hear him state any particular brand, but if you Google "dotto repositionable adhesive" you will find a few brands like HERMA and TOMBOW, etc. I hope this helps.

He said re-positionable dotto glue. I did not hear him state any particular brand, but if you Google "dotto repositionable adhesive" you will find a few brands like HERMA and TOMBOW, etc. Sounds like you would just roll the adhesive out onto your mat, making sure to cover the corners and the middle section. I hope this helps.

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Joy

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